Wokeness

It is time to stop using the word 'woke.' What began as a vital tool for identifying systemic injustice has devolved into a rigid, dogmatic label. You see, I think of myself to be quite liberal; while I tend to keep to myself about said politics, I bear some opinions which some would call unwoke. When I think to myself why someone may find my own opinions to be ‘unwoke’, synonymous with indifference to reality or an unwillingness to engage with it, it tends to be indicative of one thing – it attempts to isolate ideas that are not as intellectually rigorous as they believe it should be.

Perhaps ‘woke’ in our times is less about the culture wars fought half a decade ago, and more so about an emerging conformity within leftist circles. Woke used to be grounds for boycotting beer or Starbucks, but it evolved.

I make sense of this through a hylomorphic reduction (hylomorphism is thinking of abstract ideas such as power structures and turning them into shapes (i.e. modeling hierarchies)) of this heuristic of political attentiveness; I think that we can think of heuristics, such as ‘woke’ through its transition between wokeness as a vector and the present wokeness as a scalar.

Heuristics is simply the reduction of complex ideas into something easily consumable for the layman. In sum, it is Fox news telling someone that reduced taxes means greater economic output, rather than hosting weekly reading circles of von Mises. It reduces intellectual friction, or entropy, in order to ensure a functioning society in which the layman can grasp, ideally, 85% of really complex issues such as debates in tax policy.

Wokeness is even more abstract than Austrian economics, it seems. What was once simply African American Vernacular English (AAVE) for an awareness of systemic or racial injustice has become a bloated litmus for liberal political thought, eventually being co-opted by its audience across the aisle.

Wokeness today has two prevailing definitions amongst its two camps; conservatives which claim woke can range from trans representation to outright communism, and progressives that claim the existence of a morally consistent, congruent political agenda.

While the sheer absurdity of the conservative weaponization of wokeness has been articulated far better than I intend to do so, I really take issue with the rigidity of the wokeness-heurism. 

This is due to this apparent assumption that deviation from said congruent political agenda must be a result of being less informed than you are; or worse – a reactionary. This has been well documented in leftist revolutions since the dawn of time, and while deviation from successful revolutionary apparati has always been scrutinized (at best), we do not live in an environment predicated by violent revolution. Instead, we have enjoyed the securities of a 250 year old union.

It’s very obvious why someone would immediately disagree with me on that point. One could argue that today we deal with brownshirts prowling our streets again. However, I find this sensationalization to be really unproductive in the long run, and is quite obviously fear mongering which both sides have slung at each other for eons. All is to say that it is fair to investigate immediate threats to our society, insofar that it is not the exact koolaid that made the antagonists radical in the first place.

Woke as a heurism has evolved to be strikingly lazy of a categorization, which seems to have primacy over rigorous engagement. To be un/woke, the label does the talking. It enforces an intellectual laziness that demands total compliance within the in-group, arming itself with shibboleths and handshakes to ensure social conformity. Because the term is so elastic, it also creates a false sense of pseudo-consensus amongst these politically social groups, in which the louder the calls ring in the cathedral, the more hearkening the echoes.

Woke, as the AAVE construct it once was, certainly served its utility. However, when it entered the ‘mainstream’ I argue that it hylomorphically speaking became more of a scalar than a vector. You see, originally, the vector of political critique allows for both direction and magnitude of political agendas. A vector space allows for different coordinates and different directions, in which we can keep our ideas grounded in the direction of progress, in different ranges. It is enfranchising and democratic, and accommodates variances in political thought in which deviation is what builds these vector fields, not dismantles them.

The scalarity – or the flattening of ‘woke’ is what we seem to experience today. Whereas personal materialist or theoretic critique logically create infinite conclusions, unique to the individual, structural inquiry must be directionless and unapologetically correct. Because the scalar framework only measures compliance, tolerating variances in magnitude but critical of deviant agendas, anyone operating outside of the script is seen as ignorant, or simply too uncritical. However, with all orthodoxies, they eventually evolve with the tide of change, which unfortunately enforces compliance with a moving target.

Whereas we have all recognized that the right-wing application of woke is at best a floating signifier – a meaningless label to throw at something they don’t like, the left wing enforces wokeness as a scalar matrix, almost a flat benchmark of spiritual hygiene, mistaking intellectual variance as systemic threats.

After soul searching, being labeled as unwoke isn’t a measure of intellectual rigor, it’s a measure of compliance. We should be cultivating millions of little sovereign political agendas, in which the most rigorous survive on their own merit. It feels as if MAGA has instilled martial law into leftist circles, suspending our rights to independent inquiry. To tie it back to an easy, modern heurism, wokeness is being performative. There is nothing more woke in its original sense than to rise above the system that is unfair.

The co-optation of woke from AAVE should be called what it really is; linguistic commodification that destroys the original nuance. Intellectual and social clarity needs us to return precise, narrow words to their precise and narrow original contexts. Stripped of its history, the word was flattened into a scalar litmus and has also become a meaningless vessel for cultural anxieties. The exhaustion of its mainstream iteration does not negate its original utility, and it carries a clear, functional meaning.

We shouldn’t keep fighting with a husk of a word. We should be fighting with crisp, original ideas.